The Anti-Conceptual Basis of Anarchism

By: Andrew K. Deaton

Anarchism is often upheld as the pinnacle of freedom, even by those who add the disclaimer that it is “too much” freedom.  There are many supposed variants of anarchism: anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-capitalism, etc.  Their underlying theme has no positive platform, but only a single negative: the dissolution of the state, or anarchy.  (Note that anarchism is that ideology which wishes to bring about anarchy.  The terms are often erroneously used interchangeably.)  Since its platform is essentially negative, libertarianism should properly be identified as a more mainstream, less confrontational presentation of what is really anarchism.  For purposes of this essay, the term “anarchism” will refer to a spectrum of ideologies in which libertarianism is but the logical antecedent to outright anarchism in much the same way that socialism is but a waypoint to communism.  Thus, all criticisms henceforth applying to anarchism are to be taken univocally against libertarianism in equal measure.  (I will not try to explain just yet the supposed points of disagreement between the different “types” of anarchist thought, as I will explain below why there can be no such thing as different forms of anarchy.)  Ultimately, anarchism – remember, this includes libertarianism – is characterized solely by a rejection of concepts as such, and it is only by first positively advocating conceptualization that anarchism might be rejected and that a truly free society might be brought forth.

At its root, anarchism upholds the metaphysics of determinism.  Determinism is the doctrine which states that man has no more free will than does a lump of coal.  With this as its footing, anarchism proclaims that individuals can be corralled under the proper social circumstances to act in perfect harmony with one another.  Once those circumstances are achieved – beginning with the abolition of the state – anarchism claims that we will have achieved a social system which will be in such perfect working order that it needs not the maintenance of the thought of the individual, that it will inexorably maintain itself.  Even if there are the occasional hiccoughs from certain rogue anomalies who cause some trouble here and there, they will be immediately quashed by the dialectical power of anarchy and society will bounce right back to tranquility.

Since it is the whole of anarchy’s workings – the anarchic Geist, so to speak – which will resolve all societal ills and since man cannot be held responsible for anything against the background of determinism, anarchism necessarily espouses agnosticism, first in epistemology and as a consequence also in the arena of ethics.

Epistemology is the field that asks if we can know anything, what we can know, and how we can know.  For anarchism, epistemology is a dead end.  It is only through free will that man might have knowledge, and it is by determinism that he is barred from the slightest mote of certainty.  Knowledge is power, and power is knowledge.  Since determinism reduces man to the agency of a lump of coal, it also reduces him to the cognitive efficacy of that same inanimate lump.  Anarchism is the manifestation of the epistemology of Immanuel Kant.  For anarchism, all beliefs are either analytic or synthetic; that is, they are all either idle fantasies or they are unverifiable postulates.  Since thought is thereby rendered irrelevant to reality, there is only room for impulsive action on the anarchist scheme.  Thus, anarchists say, the only way to achieve the perfection of an anarchic society is to dissolve the “artificial” and “unnatural” illusion put forth by the concept-born state and instead to return to the rule of concrete-bound instincts – spontaneous, randomized action inspired by whim and answering only to whim.  (How it is that anything could be “unnatural” in a deterministic universe is something for which anarchists will not even begin to account.)

Since man has no choice under determinism, moral judgment is thereby rendered non-applicable according to anarchism.  When speaking of determinism, a killer has no more moral culpability in murder than does a house which collapses on its occupants.  Thus, according to anarchism there are no such things as political rights as rights are nothing more than the implementation of ethics (or morality) in a societal context.  Anarchism opposes the state because it sees the state as imposing upon individuals a moral structure, i.e. the moral structure which dictates that it is wrong to initiate the use of force.  Anarchism forbids that any man should be forbidden from anything whatsoever and that his natural instincts be his only motive power.  (In ethics, too, anarchists refuse to acknowledge the fact that they are inherently assuming a contradiction: their “right” to violate the rights of others at the anarchists’ pleasure.)

With its utter agnosticism, anarchism refutes concepts wholly.  A concept is formed by accurately integrating the data of the senses through essences, by stripping perceptual entities of their discrepancies and finding their unique underlying commonality.  Concepts are the key to man’s survival, as it is essential to man’s nature that he live by concepts.  That is what distinguishes him from all other organisms and makes him qualitatively superior to them.  Without concepts, he loses that distinction and is ruled by whim (or instinct).  Rule by whim psychologically means rule by force politically.  It means that man becomes impulsive like David Hume’s legendary billiard ball being struck by the cue.  Just like the billiard ball, men lose the ability to peaceably resolve disputes – even honest misunderstandings – and have no choice – no choice but to use force to survive, to force the other billiard balls out of their path.  As Hobbes famously put it, this natural (read: pre-conceptual) state is “nasty, brutish, and short.”  Anarchists really only want freedom from one thing: concepts, which means freedom from thought, which means freedom from the responsibility which a state’s rule of objective law codifies.  If man is “freed” from thought, he thereby becomes an absolute slave to everything else: disease, famine, the elements, and especially the fear that his neighbor next door might spontaneously murder him in his sleep.  If one accepts anarchism, who is to stop his neighbor from doing just that (or himself from doing just that to his neighbor)?  Anarchism is nothing more than the advocacy of a return to a pre-historic condition, with all of the “freedom” which that entails.

While anarchism is nothing more than a negation of all thought in a societal context, a rejection of anarchism must propose a positive, constructive alternative.  (Since the focus of this particular piece is to demonstrate the invalidity of anarchism, I will discuss the proper alternative only insofar as is necessary to prove that there is one.  I would like to put forward a more focused address of the subject in the future.)  That alternative is a state with an objective government, which requires an entity that has a monopoly on the use of force over a certain geographic area.  Yet of what would an objective government consist?  It would be one that is ruled by objective law.  By “objective law” I mean law which is designed only to protect the rights of the governed and is applied only to protect those rights.  This requires three apparatuses: the courts, to provide arbitration of disputes between men, both honest and criminal; the police, to enforce the law domestically amongst citizens; and the armed forces, to protect the collective citizenry of the state from external threats. 

The key objection brought forth by anarchists is that this is the initiation of force by the state because it does not allow men to pick and choose whose laws they will abide by on which days – assuming they choose to abide by any.  There is no way to guarantee that the government will not become corrupt just as every government today is to one extent or another, so why should men not have the right to “subscribe” to another code of laws at their own leisure?  The response is simple: there simply is no way to “guarantee” that a government will not become corrupt because there is no way to “guarantee” that its citizens will not become corrupt.  Thus, we have come full-circle: the nature of man is that of a being with free will.  The only way to prevent corrupt, tyrannical, bad government is to change the fundamental philosophy of that government’s society.  The mechanistic, deterministic, clockwork society for which anarchists search simply does not exist if the society in question is made up of human beings.  This is also to what I was referring at the beginning of this essay when I said that the myriad hair-splitting distinctions between anarchists are false since they are based on a forecast of how men must behave when government is dissolved.  No matter how perfect, how utopian, how peaceful a society becomes; the price of freedom always remains eternal vigilance.  A society will be free only so long as its citizens work to both achieve and then to perpetually maintain that freedom.  Any talk of a system that removes the contingency of free will talks of removing man since he is the contingency.  It can be guaranteed that good philosophy leads to good government (freedom) and bad philosophy leads to tyranny (I take this term to encompass anarchism).  Yet guaranteeing that men will choose one over the other is a metaphysical impossibility as it contradicts the nature of man as a being with free will.  It is for each individual in a society to decide what he believes, what he advocates, what he strives toward.  Thus, men must become rationally convinced if they are to uphold a free society while anarchism attempts to bypass the nature of man altogether and thereby only ends in bypassing freedom to make way for force.  Thus, a society’s level of freedom is in direct correspondence to that same society’s reverence for concepts, thus exposing the reality that anarchism’s hatred of the state is really a hatred of concepts, man, and freedom.

Invisible Ideas

Invisible Children Movement Influences Abuse of Political Power

By: Patrick T. Adams

Two weeks have passed now since what can only be classified as a social media phenomenon: the Kony 2012 viral video. For about a week, this 30-minute video, sponsored by the not-for-profit group Invisible Children Inc., spread like wildfire through YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, bringing the video to over 85 million views. It had nothing to do with the usual suspects of social media mentions: March Madness, American Idol, the GOP campaign, etc. In fact, oddly and frighteningly enough, it was political without seeming political – your typical trip into postmodern hipsteria. It had nothing to do with the Keystone pipeline, the Arab Spring, ObamaCare’s constitutionality, birth control, or unemployment, but rather with the welfare of displaced and abused Ugandans amidst a violent insurrection led by religious extremist Joseph Kony. There is a crucial contention to shed light on, though not with the moral status of this civil war in itself. On the contrary, the contention is with the U.S. decision to intervene politically and militarily. I can tell already that I’m fighting an uphill battle against a vast social media army, but you have to climb a few flights of stairs just to defenestrate anything.

The subject matter of the video concerns Joseph Kony, a Ugandan guerilla warlord and religious zealot who is notorious for his abduction and conscription of thousands of children into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). While his political ambitions are to usurp the current Ugandan regime and erect a theocracy based on the 10 Commandments – a sort of Christian Sharia law – his militant sadism and mystical obsession with black magic seem to suggest pathological megalomania.

There is no question that Kony is truly evil and quite insane – bearing an uncanny resemblance to Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – but are his actions proper grounds for a U.S. political or military intervention? Many seem to think so, including George W. Bush (ordered the 2008-2009 Operation Lightning Thunder during his presidency), President Obama (signed into law the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act), and an overwhelming consensus crossing both sides of the aisle in both the Senate and House of Representatives. The acclaimed documentarians from Invisible Children clearly reached some very elite ears in addition to those of several impassioned Americans.

The government’s role, however – despite years of neoconservative and liberal welfare wars – is not to apportion its troops’ lives and its civilians’ money for the sake of foreign disputes that have negligible relevance to U.S. foreign policy interests. The government, as the American Founders imagined and established, should be reined in because of its monopoly on the use of force, a monopoly to be exercised only in retaliation to initiated force (there is no such thing as a right to initiate the use of force). Man requires individual rights, within a social context, as a moral sanction to act on his own judgment for the sake of his own life. To surrender one’s judgment to another or idling oneself to deterministic forces is to surrender the only human means of survival: the mind. In this respect, government is necessary as a means to securing man’s rights.

Rights are also not determined by arbitrary, subjective whims. Conceptually, rights are conciliated by a philosophical axiom, the law of identity, meaning that rights are not contradictory (i.e. they do not apply only to certain individuals but not others, or in some scenarios but not others). The identity in question when regarding man’s rights is the identity of man qua man, thus by being a man (read: human being) one has certain rights. As mentioned before, man’s identity is that of an organism who survives by the unfettered use of his mind, and rights are the recognition of this fact insofar as they leave a man free to follow the convictions of his own mind. A slave owner who believes in the right to life while denying it to his slaves has some premises to recheck.

A proper application of individual rights to foreign policy will show that government action not on its citizens’ behalf is a sacrifice of its citizens’ pursuits, and therefore of their individual rights. International political and military engagements require an enormous commitment of resources: strategic planning, time, money, and often human lives, with the latter being the most important consideration. When and if the government commits these things to any other purpose than ensuring the protection of its citizens, it is then abusing the powers delegated to it.

This is the case with the U.S. providing assistance to the Ugandan government. One hundred U.S. troops have been committed by the authorization of President Obama, but consider taxpayer dollars as well. According to a Congressional Budget Office cost estimate published in late 2009, implementation of the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act would cost $28 million over the 2010-2014 period.

But these are just insignificant considerations, right? It’s just 100 troops. They’re just advisory. It’s only $28 million. The Ugandans are less privileged than we are.

To think in such a way drops context and marginalizes our own problems. The U.S. is not a disposable asset to the rest of the world simply by being the most prosperous nation on Earth. Those 100 troops, advisory or not, are being put at risk simply by allying against such a radical militant group, and even if it were just one troop, that doesn’t reduce the significance of that life, let alone 100 of them. Servicemen do serve a purpose, but it’s to protect our individual rights, not to distribute war handouts. Remember the hellhole of Vietnam?  The U.S. initially became involved only in sending Green Berets as “advisors” to the South Vietnamese. We all know how that turned out. It’s really easy to get desensitized to numbers in this day and age when politicians toss around the military and billions of dollars like pocket change. This is why it’s so important to deal in concepts in lieu of the sensory overstimulation and shock value coughed up by sensationalist documentarians and politicians.

Also, the focal point of this movement is what appears to be a madman driven by religious ideology. Assuming Kony is still alive - and apparently there is reasonable speculation that he isn’t - who’s to say that making him “famous,” as the Invisible Children movement intends, or offering financial and military assistance to his enemies won’t provoke the LRA to commit retaliatory violence, possibly exacerbating the situation and requiring more effort to defeat the LRA? Who’s to say that this won’t become pro-Kony propaganda that gains him recruits in the form of opportunists and similarly minded ideologues?  Islamic terrorists acting in the name of Allah certainly didn’t mind provoking the powerhouse United States over the past few decades.

However, it’s important to identify the critical difference between the actions of Islamic militants, specifically al-Qaeda, and those of the LRA. The former actually initiated aggression against innocent Americans in multiple instances throughout the 1990s and 2001. In such cases, the U.S. had moral justification in responding with retaliatory force. On the other hand, the LRA is indeed contemptible, but they do not warrant a U.S. political or military intervention; they have not initiated aggression against us.

It’s no wonder that pacifist anti-war groups gain so much clout when the U.S. sacrifices human lives and spends itself into oblivion with so many altruistic liberation wars and skirmishes. On the current path, if the time comes when the U.S. is truly put in a position to defend its citizens’ rights and safety, it will be even more difficult to gather the resolve to successfully engage in an armed conflict when resources are allocated elsewhere.

What is particularly unsettling is that a string of well edited documentary clips and poorly developed concepts is enough to mystify and incite mob rule from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. And a couple of weeks later, it seems to be completely forgotten. Although it’s creepy, it’s not surprising in a country where the overwhelming attitude is that benevolence requires coercively forcing the sacrifice of its citizenry to the latest emotional impulse. The proper alternative to this altruistic bandwagoning, however, is a genuine intellectual commitment to principles and not mere stimuli. A positive difference in the state of the world can’t be achieved by drawing tickets randomly out of a lottery of issues.